Flowers

References

• Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD)
• Almost Plausible: Flashlight
• Eddie Izzard: “Do you have a flag?”
• Silphium
• Tangled
• Kevin Hart
• Rick Moranis
• My Blue Heaven
• Little Shop of Horrors
• Baby’s Breath
• SimpleGreen
• Soylent Green
• The Victorian trade in dead bodies
• Salem Witch Trials
• Gilmore Girls
  • Stars Hollow
• The Music Man
• Grizzly Man
• 9 Rarest Lunar Events
• Hocus Pocus
• American Accents in the late 18th Century
• Leavenworth, WA
• Society for Creative Anachronism
• Steven King
• Dean Koontz
• The Monkey’s Paw

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Thomas]
Good start to our story. Now let’s help it blossom into a full movie.

[Shep]
(Pained groans)

[Emily]
Yes.

[Thomas]
I know you want to nip it in the bud, but-

[Emily]
It’s a thorn in your side, these puns.

[Shep]
Oh, my god. Now there’s two of them.

[Emily]
It’s so rare that I have a pun that you have to give it to me.

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary objects and turn them into movies. Today we’ll ponder how flowers can play a central role in a film. We’ll plant the seeds of some story ideas in our pitch session, and then we’ll pick one of those ideas and help it grow into a complete movie plot. I’m Thomas J. Brown, and bunched up in here with me are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard-

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
The stereotype in our society is that women love flowers, and men generally either don’t like them or just don’t care about them. Emily, Shep, what are your thoughts on flowers?

[Shep]
I don’t care about them. Sorry to be stereotypical.

[Thomas]
Okay,

[Shep]
I got flowers as gifts when I changed schools, back when I was an English teacher and my students bought me a bouquet of, like, go away… going away– (“go away” flowers?)

[Emily and Thomas]
“Go away” flowers!

[Shep]
“Get out of here” flowers. No, going away flowers. And I was like, “What do I… what am I supposed to do with these? It’s just a big, huge, giant bouquet. It does nothing for me.” And my girlfriend at the time is like, “Oh, no, we’ll get a vase.” She’s looking around my house for a vase. Like, why would I have a vase?

[Emily]
I also fit the stereotype. I do love flowers. In fact, I was walking through the grocery store the other day and I saw these beautiful bouquets, and I was like, “Oh, nobody’s ever going to buy me flowers again. I don’t have anyone who loves me enough to buy me flowers.” And then I was like, “Dumb bitch, you can buy yourself flowers. It’s fine.”

[Shep]
Yes, I bought flowers for a friend of mine just because she was like, “No one’s ever going to buy me flowers.” Like, okay, let’s go onto FTD or bouquets.com or whatever it was at the time. Just send flowers. Just surprise.

[Thomas]
Right. I’ve given flowers and sent flowers before, and I have received flowers. For me, being from Hawaii, a lei is, I think that’s pretty cool. That’s how I would want to receive flowers, but just, like, a bouquet of flowers? Buy me herbs or something I’ll use.

[Shep]
Yeah, it does nothing for me.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I don’t get it at all.

[Emily]
They brighten up this space. Sometimes they smell good.

[Shep]
It made me happy to make my friend happy. But the flowers themselves are nothing.

[Thomas]
Right?

[Emily]
I love flowers.

[Shep]
Okay. I’m glad that you’re here, Emily.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
This was going to be a very unbalanced episode.

[Thomas]
I will say, if somebody was going to buy me a gift, that is a thing I don’t care about, I’d rather it be something like flowers, which will die eventually, and then I can dispose of them and not something that I’m expected to keep in my house on display forever.

[Emily]
Right. That makes sense.

[Thomas]
But again, buy me, like, a potted basil plant or something. I’ll get a ton of use out of that.

[Emily]
Right?

[Shep]
No, he doesn’t speak for all of us. Don’t buy me a chore.

[Thomas]
That’s why I said I not we.

[Shep]
I wonder if it’s because I’m colorblind that the flowers just have no-

[Emily]
That would make a lot of sense.

[Shep]
I do have a lot of flowers at my house. This house used to be owned by my sister, and she planted a bunch of flowers, and after she left, in the front, there was one side that had flowers, and one side that didn’t have flowers. I planted a bunch of perennials on the side that didn’t have any flowers so that they’ll both have flowers. I did plant flowers so that my front looks even, but because it wasn’t even not because it was lacking flowers, I guess.

[Emily]
It was about symmetry.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
It wasn’t about flowers.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Now, Shep, I want you to write a poem that’s like, “Roses are red, or so I’ve been told.”

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
All right, well, let’s get to some pitches. Shep, why don’t we hear from you first?

[Shep]
Okay. How about a tiny world? I know I pitch Tiny Worlds all the time. And we did Flashlight. That was a tiny world one.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
How about, we haven’t done a Tiny World in a while?

[Thomas]
They’re tiny, so there’s plenty of room for tiny worlds.

[Shep]
Yes. It will make them all exist in the same universe, which is just like one house.

[Thomas]
There we go.

[Emily]
So is this like the sequel to Flashlight then? This is the group that got out, and this is the community that they meet and they live amongst the flowers.

[Shep]
Yeah. Or they meet a different village, a tribe of people that live amongst the flowers. They’re colonists. They’re trying to take over. Like, “We need a place to live and survive.” And the flower people are like, “We live here.”

[Emily]
“This is our home.” “Yeah, it looks real good.”

[Shep]
“Do you have a flag?”

[Emily]
Oh, my gosh. No, it tracks too well because they go from being religiously oppressed.

[Shep]
Right. Oh, no. It’s going to be part of a trilogy. What’s the third one? How does it end? Stay tuned. Okay, picture a fantasy world where there’s some sort of disaster, like an earthquake or something, and like, a regular sunflower and maybe some other flowers falls underground, and there’s like a dragon vein, you know, dragon vein, like leyline, you know, energy flowing underground. And due to proximity to that, these flowers, these plants anthropomorphized into people. But the sunflower wants to make its way back to the surface because it loves the sun. But getting too far from the dragon vein will turn it back into regular flower. That’s it for me.

[Thomas]
All right, Emily, what do you have?

[Emily]
My pictures are a woman finds a pressed flower in an antique book she buys, and it’s the most unusual flower she’s ever seen, and no one she knows can identify it. She kind of becomes obsessed with identifying it, so she goes to, like, a university… What do you call those people?

[Thomas]
Like, a botanist?

[Emily]
Botanist. There you go. Just to try and figure out what it is. And maybe it’s a mysterious plant that has been long extinct. Maybe it’s from another planet. Maybe they fall in love. I don’t know. There’s lots of places the story can go from there.

[Thomas]
It’s that one from Roman times that was, like, the super effective birth control-

[Emily]
Yeah. That went extinct because they just were like, “It works.”

[Thomas]
Because it was so effective as birth control? Yeah.

[Emily]
And then my final one, of course, is a serial killer whose method of murder is a poisonous flower.

[Thomas]
All right, so my ideas are a group of people on an expedition who are trying to find an absurdly rare flower that is rumored to live in a dangerous and remote place. According to legend, the flower has some kind of special or magical property, so it heals or it grants wishes or teleports people back in time, whatever. Something like that.

[Shep]
A time travel movie! Tell me more.

[Emily]
No, they cut it up and they put it in a soup, and then the pregnant queen drinks it and then the witch steals her baby after she has the baby. And then her hair grows really, really long and she won’t cut it. And then she uses her hair to heal her and make her young.

[Shep]
What?

[Thomas]
Yeah. What the fuck?

[Emily]
It’s the plot of Tangled.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
I forgot that one had a magical flower in it.

[Shep]
I also forgot that one had a magical flower in it.

[Emily]
A very big theme in the movie.

[Thomas]
My next idea, the FBI is running an operation in some city, and they’re using a flower shop as a front because classic.

[Shep]
Oh, it’s a sting operation. Ey!

[Thomas]
Ey! One of the agents gets more interested in being a florist than in actually doing his FBI agent job. He’s like, really taking it seriously. The floral arrangements, I mean, not the spying.

[Emily]
Is the FBI agent Kevin Hart, because I want it to be Kevin Hart and then The Rock.

[Thomas]
I mean it is now.

[Shep]
No, I want it to be Rick Moranis.

[Emily]
Oh…

[Shep]
Rick, come back. We love you.

[Emily]
That would be good. No, he’s the shop owner.

[Thomas]
Yeah, they’ve taken over-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
They’re using his shop.

[Shep]
I’m thinking of My Blue Heaven. That’s where he was an agent of some sort.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I was thinking you were tying it back into Little Shop of Horrors.

[Shep]
Oh no. I guess there’s that too.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Oh my gosh, it’s all coming together.

[Emily]
(Singing) Suddenly Rick Moranis.

[Thomas]
And my final idea, there are a lot of flowers at cemeteries. So maybe there’s something about the flowers that are resurrecting the dead. Are they zombies or are they basically just normal people who’ve come back to life? Maybe this is happening in one small town and it’s just sort of a known thing there and they’re like keeping it quiet. But our protagonist recently moved here from the big city.

[Shep]
No, it’s the opposite of everything you said.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
Putting flowers on graves in the cemetery stops them from turning into zombies. They don’t explain, they just encourage people to bring flowers. But maybe the florist shop gets taken over by FBI agents for some reason and they can’t bring out flowers to the cemetery and that causes the zombie apocalypse.

[Thomas]
What is the minimum number of flowers required to keep the zombies underground?

[Emily]
Three.

[Thomas]
Not three.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Then you’ve got a triage of which zombies you’re going to let come back and do the babies first because they’ll be easier to manage.

[Emily]
But they’re more ravenous.

[Shep]
And they’re faster and they’re tricky and they’re harder to shoot because they’re so small. You fool. You put the flower on the babies first. That’s why they have baby’s breath, it’s to stop the babies.

[Thomas]
So those are my ideas. Is there one in particular that jumped out at us?

[Shep]
A little baby zombie. What?

[Emily]
I mean, you joke, but I do like that one the best. Of course, obviously.

[Thomas]
I like the idea that it’s this thing that we’re all kind of aware of. Like, oh, you know, you’re going to go and put flowers at somebody’s grave but-

[Emily]
This town is obsessive about it and they have, like, a dedicated time or day that they do it.

[Thomas]
Right, maybe everybody has, like a section of the graveyard or there’s like twelve cemetery keepers and it’s like, wow, that’s like the number one industry or the number two industry in town after flower grower. Everybody has these like immaculate gardens, these huge beautiful flower gardens. Everyone’s like, “Oh, they’re really into gardening in this town.” No, they couldn’t care less about the gardening.

[Shep]
That raises another point. If flowers prevent zombies, why not just plant flowers on the graves?

[Thomas]
Well, the soil won’t-

[Shep]
It’s tricky because you could just be like, oh, the soil is cursed, whatever, things won’t grow in it except for grass. But just put them in a pot. Put them in a pot on top of the grave.

[Thomas]
Well then what are the rules?

[Emily]
No, the flowers have to touch the soil, but they can’t grow in the soil because flowers, when you put them at the gravesite, they’re not living generally. Usually. I mean, some people do that, but they’re just the cut ones.

[Shep]
It’s as the flowers decay, as they’re dying that causes this field of anti-life, that prevents-

[Thomas]
The energy that’s leaving the flowers-

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Does something, keeps the protective layer-?

[Shep]
So it has to be cut flowers on the grave. Consider it like gas coming off of the flower.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Off gassing of the flowers.

[Shep]
Yes. That’s where that scent comes from.

[Thomas]
Is there a magical layer that’s been sort of like a hex type of thing has been placed over the ground and as long as you keep enough flowers there, it’ll keep that barrier alive or that barrier healthy?

[Shep]
I have a different question. Are they still adding graves to this graveyard? Are they still burying people here? Because if so, why?

[Thomas]
Yeah, you think they wouldn’t.

[Emily]
Yeah. There has to be a reason why they would have to, but there’s no reason they would have to.

[Shep]
So maybe it’s not a graveyard that they’re adding new graves to. It’s very old graves.

[Emily]
Yeah. It’s very old. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right. A historical cemetery.

[Emily]
And the guy at first thinks, “Oh, these people are very dedicated to their loved ones.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
And then he finds out, like, what they actually do with them is either like, compost them or cremate them and they’re not burying them anymore. And they’re like, “Why are we so obsessive about this?”

[Shep]
Well, that brings up another question. Why are they not just exuming all the bodies and cremating them? That solves the problem permanently.

[Emily]
Because if you cross that barrier, they wake up.

[Shep]
So trying to dig them up turns them into zombies immediately. They’ll meet you halfway.

[Thomas]
So maybe there’s a bit of a bluff that we get early on where we introduce this idea of people who are really dedicated to upkeep of this graveyard and putting these flowers on there, and everybody grows flowers and all this stuff. But it occurs to him at some point that this graveyard is crazy old.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Where’s the modern graveyard? There isn’t one. And he realizes, like, all the dead bodies are being shipped out of town at night, like on some train or something or whatever, and he’s like, “What the fuck?” So he thinks there’s some shady shit going on there and then stumbles into the actual truth.

[Emily]
He thinks they’re selling the bodies on the black market or something.

[Shep]
Turning them into Simple Green- er, Soilent Green. Simple Green is the-

[Emily]
The cleaner.

[Thomas]
A really clean town. Those floors sparkle.

[Emily]
I mean, it is plant based.

[Shep]
Let’s get Simple Green to sponsor this episode.

[Thomas]
This doesn’t have to take place now. This could take place during that time period where-

[Emily]
Where you sold cadavers?

[Thomas]
It was illegal to operate on dead bodies, and so doctors would have to acquire them illegally to be able to make scientific discoveries.

[Shep]
I think that’s making it too complicated.

[Thomas]
All right.

[Shep]
I think it just should be said in modern, like, we should be able to identify with the main character.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
You know, they inherit this house in this town. Their great aunt or whatever died without any heirs and passed it on to them. But she also maintained a section of the graveyard, and they, the townsfolk just expect him to also maintain that. But he’s not into that. He’s not related to any of those people. He doesn’t know why he would go out every Sunday and put flowers on 17 graves or whatever, because that’s ridiculous. “That’s absurd. She did that every Sunday? That’s nonsense. I’m not going to do that.”

[Emily]
“That’s so much money.”

[Shep]
Oh, no. She grew all the flowers because it’s way too much money. That’s not maintainable. So she’s got, like, 17 acres, ten of which are flowers. He’s like, “We could use this for, we could put in a vineyard or something. Why are we growing flowers that we then just cut and leave on graves? We’re not even selling the flowers. Ridiculous.” He’s, like, business oriented.

[Emily]
He’s a big city businessman coming to the quaint small town with its quirky little rituals.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
So set it up like a Hallmark-

[Shep]
Oh, it’s a rom-com. Okay, I’m on board. I’m fully on board now.

[Thomas]
Which zombie does he fall in love with?

[Shep]
Ooh, I didn’t even think about that. That makes it really awkward, because the end of the movie is you got to get rid of the zombies.

[Thomas]
Maybe there’s like one zombie that lives in a crypt above ground who’s kind of on the human side for whatever reason or is just stuck there, can’t leave, because the ground is toxic to zombies. I don’t know. He gets cajoled into putting the flowers on the graves. He’s like, “Ugh. Fine.” He goes one night, puts them all out there and sees her in the crypt. And he’s like, “What the fuck?”

[Shep]
Oh, she can’t leave because there’s flowers all over the place. She can’t pass through the area with the flowers. So this is on the east coast where they executed those witches, right?

[Emily]
Salem?

[Shep]
That’s the town that we’re thinking of, Salem? Or Salem adjacent.

[Emily]
Salem adjacent. I mean, there’s a number of towns on the east coast where they executed witches.

[Shep]
Right. This is one of those places where the witches then cursed the town. So they’ve been maintaining these graves ever since then. That’s how old these graves are.

[Emily]
And they’ve just been shipping out or burning the bodies since.

[Shep]
Yes. Burning the bodies. The bodies are disappearing. There’s no new graveyard. But that’s because he asks, “Where’s my great aunt buried?” They’re like, “Oh, she’s not buried.”

[Emily]
I like that they would cremate and not do composting because why would you trust that new technology?

[Thomas]
Well why would you risk putting bodies in soil?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Burn it. Burn it so there’s nothing left to come back.

[Shep]
Immediately burn it.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
Oh, man. If someone died in their home and nobody noticed, they would zombify.

[Emily]
So there’s a whole team that you’ve got the people that maintain the cemetery, but there’s a whole other team that go around and knock on doors every day.

[Thomas]
If this is a pretty small town, then maybe that’s like the main job of the police is, like, doing well checks on people, and they have, like, a roster, making sure everyone’s accounted for every day.

[Shep]
Oh, this is why everybody’s house has flowers all the way around it. Because if they zombify in the house-

[Emily]
Oh, they can’t get out.

[Shep]
They could still if some guy has a heart attack in his sleep and dies, he’s probably going to wake up and bite his wife. So it would spread that way, but it wouldn’t get beyond the house.

[Thomas]
I like that all the little details we have so far are speaking to years and years of experience and all the little tricks they’ve come up with.

[Shep]
Right. It only takes three or four zombie outbreaks before you start to learn.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
So I like the idea of him sleeping in, like his first morning there. He’s just sleeping in, in this lazy little town because he’s a big city businessman, so he’s had on vacation.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Maybe he showed up late at night so he’s tired.

[Emily]
Yeah. And then there’s a knock on the door because everybody knows who’s in and out of town. And he’s like half naked answering the door, and the cop’s just like, “Good morning, just want to check on you, make sure you got in okay.” And he’s like, “What the fuck?”

[Shep]
It’s small town friendliness.

[Emily]
But still it’s off putting. “Thank you. Bye.”

[Shep]
They’re checking to see who all is going to live there. “Is it just you here? Are you the only one.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Got to update the roster.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
“Do you have any kids? Any pets?”

[Shep]
All the houses, by the way, all the houses have bars on all the windows, which is an unus- “Is there a lot of crime in this small town?”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“All the windows have bars on them?”

[Emily]
Yeah, there’s these beautiful, gorgeous gardens at everybody’s house and then bars.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
That’s a really good juxtaposition. I like that imagery.

[Shep]
So he’s talking about all the things that he wants to change. He wants to take the bars off the windows. He wants to just put in a lawn. Instead of having just flowers, how about some grass, a place for kids to play?

[Thomas]
Is there a town charter that seeks to prevent this sort of thing?

[Emily]
Yes, absolutely.

[Shep]
The homeowners-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
It’s Stars Hollow level.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Like they have monthly town meetings where they discuss and complain, and somebody’s like, “Their flowers are not high enough,” or “They haven’t-“

[Thomas]
There’s like, one section of fence at someone’s house where the flowers have kind of died off for some reason. “I’m just saying it’s a problem. It could be they’re endangering the entire town.”

[Emily]
Someone’s worried about some sort of fungal blight hitting all of the flowers.

[Thomas]
What is the big threat? Is our main character the big threat to the town? Is there a new blood moon, some sort of crazy moon cycle thing that’s coming up-

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
That’s going to cause the flower power to temporarily be disabled or weakened or they’re ramping up flower production so that they can counteract this thing.

[Shep]
Right. That’s good. That puts upcoming an increasing tension-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That the main character is not going to understand the importance of it.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And the townsfolk are grappling with “How do we explain this bonkers situation” to this basically this outsider.

[Thomas]
Right. Because it’s not like this is the first time someone from the outside has moved into this town-

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
And they’ve had to explain it.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And it’s a problem every time because it sounds insane.

[Shep]
Yes. Oh, they probably assign someone to the new people that come in. Nobody wants to take it.

[Emily]
Do you think that everybody in the town fully believes it, or do they just go along with it? Or is everyone 100% on board? This happens and they all know.

[Thomas]
I think it depends on how that gets explained. So if we have a zombie trapped in a crypt surrounded by flowers, you could show the person like, “Hey, see this zombie? See how they’re real?”

[Emily]
I like that, cause then yeah, there would be a couple of crypts.

[Shep]
Well then do we want to have a zombie in a crypt so that we could just show that it’s real? Or do you want to hold on to ‘this could just be a crazy town of crazy people that have gone small town mad.’

[Emily]
It’s just an out-of-control cultural ritual.

[Thomas]
Right. He just assumes “It’s a small enough town that the cops showed up on day one to knock on my fucking door. Like, I think they all got together and are pulling my chain here.”

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Like, mess with the new guy from the city. I mean, how many people live in this town? Is it like a hundred people? Maybe? Like, how small is this town?

[Shep]
It’s tiny tiny.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
It’s got to be because otherwise word would have gotten out.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
And why would so many people have stayed? Like, once you could get out, you would leave, right? And there was like a select few that volunteered to stay and they’ve passed this on.

[Thomas]
That could actually be another problem.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Like kids are moving out. They don’t want to stay.

[Emily]
Yeah. Who wants to stay in a zombie town?

[Shep]
Right. That’s why the great aunt didn’t have any heirs that were going to come and take over this house. Nobody wants that house. You can’t sell the houses there. Who’s going to buy them?

[Thomas]
So him being there, they don’t really want him there because he’s this outsider, but they do kind of want him there because they need warm bodies to maintain the flowers.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So they’re sort of like, “What do we do?” And he’s kind of on the younger side. They’re all in their fifty s. Sixty s. Seventy s. And he’s in his like 20s maybe.

[Shep]
Is that why he falls in love with the zombie? Because she’s the only one that appears to be his age?

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Because everyone else is a retiree.

[Emily]
There could be a couple of other young people. There’s a very small pool for him to choose from.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
There’s got to be a Marian the Librarian character for him because maybe he doesn’t- maybe he shows up like, “I’m just going to clean out the house and sell this place. I am not staying here. Who wants to live in this tiny ass town?”

[Emily]
The realtor is like, “You can’t sell, the market’s just awful.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
“Just hang on to it, you know, try it out. Try it on. You might like it.”

[Shep]
I think that ‘someone comes in from a big town and just wants to sell it and liquidate these assets’ is the thing that we’ve seen a lot of times. So I want to do the opposite.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
This is a person, maybe he’s a writer and he’s like, “Okay, this is a place that I can go.” He had a tiny apartment in New York that was draining him.

[Thomas]
Yeah. All he has to do is pay property tax.

[Shep]
Right. This is his opportunity to really buckle down on his writing.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Maybe he writes horror novels and so he’s looking for inspiration or whatever. So yeah, he wants to live in this town. He wants to live in this house. This is an opportunity.

[Emily]
I like it. And then he can find the quirks charming at first.

[Shep]
Right. He’s got friends that he talks to back at his old place. And all the characters here, they’re all going in. They’re all going in the novel. Everyone here is just a trip. So is it a love triangle between him and the librarian and the zombie?

[Emily]
I think we’re pushing the love of a zombie a little too hard.

[Shep]
So we do that same love with a zombie thing that we’ve seen in a bunch of other movies, but subvert it where they kill the zombie at the end because it’s a zombie.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Are you insane? No, you can’t have a relationship with a zombie.

[Emily]
You can’t, like, wish bad things will happen.

[Shep]
Yeah, bad things will happen, you idiot.

[Emily]
It can’t even be fulfilling. I mean, maybe, right? I don’t know.

[Thomas]
How would you have a relationship with a creature that was constantly trying to eat you? That’s like, “Hey, here’s a hungry grizzly bear. Fall in love with it.” Like, well…

[Shep]
Are you saying that no one has ever fucked a grizzly bear? We went to very different boy scout camps.

[Thomas]
Was it a hungry- I mean, it may have been a thirsty grizzly bear.

[Emily]
There’s a kink out there for everyone.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I saw Grizzly Man.

[Shep]
Too soon. So one of the periodic thing that the town is preparing for is the zombies growing more intelligent. Like, normally they’re mindless zombies.

[Thomas]
Yeah, but not just that, but like, their bodies heal. Like they’re stronger, they’re more normal looking.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
They’re not all falling apart.

[Shep]
They can pass for a human. This is how they sneak out of the graveyard. So you got to be careful. Every summer solstice, fucking whatever it is.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Every 66th summer.

[Shep]
Blood moon.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
How frequent is that?

[Emily]
Well, if it’s been there since the 1700s…

[Thomas]
So a full moon on a leap day is apparently pretty rare.

[Shep]
That’s too rare. This is the thing that the town knows to be prepared for. So it’s something that happens every year or every couple of years.

[Thomas]
So we could have a super moon, a micro moon, a harvest moon, a blue moon, a black moon, a super flower blood moon, which sounds perfect for our flower story.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
Sounds ideal.

[Thomas]
And it’s once every ten to twelve years. So it’s like infrequent enough to be properly rare, but frequent enough that it’s happened multiple times in these people’s lifetimes.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So what is the super flower blood moon?

[Thomas]
Okay. It says “Occasionally a super moon may coincide with a total lunar eclipse. This phenomenon is called super flower blood moon. It is quite rare, as two conditions need to be fulfilled at the same time. First, the moon needs to fall entirely within the Earth’s umbra, the central region of the Earth’s shadow. Secondly, it needs to be a super moon, meaning the full moon coinciding with the perigee position.”

[Emily]
That sounds awesomely rare and perfect for a zombie movie.

[Thomas]
It sounds like we have some pretty good setup for our story and some good raising stakes that we’re working toward to really ramp up the threat to our characters. So let’s stop and smell the roses. And then when we come back from our break, we’ll figure out the rest of our story for flowers.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back. Good start to our story. Now let’s help it blossom into a full movie.

[Shep]
(Pained groans)

[Emily]
Yes.

[Thomas]
I know you want to nip it in the bud, but-

[Emily]
It’s a thorn in your side, these puns.

[Shep]
Oh, my god. Now there’s two of them.

[Emily]
It’s so rare that I have a pun that you have to give it to me.

[Thomas]
All right, so we have this tiny little town with a super old, like, hundreds of years old cemetery. We have established that there’s something about flowers that prevent the zombies from coming to life, but a super flower blood moon is just weeks away, perhaps at the beginning of the beginning of the story?

[Emily]
I like that weeks is a good time frame because it’s enough time frame to get to know the town and get embedded into the stakes of it, but also enough time to still be super confused.

[Thomas]
And a bit skeptical as well.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So when it all starts kicking off, that’s when he’s really like, “Oh, shit. Okay, it’s real.”

[Shep]
Oh. The effect that the flowers have on the zombies, it disorients them.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
So they just get lost. And so they instinctively don’t go where flowers are. And that’s why if you put flowers around a house and someone’s a zombie inside, they will go around in a circle inside the house, because if they go out, they’ll get disoriented.

[Thomas]
It acts as a repellent in that respect.

[Shep]
Right. So when the guy who’s not believing in the zombie stuff sees the woman in a cemetery as the super flower moon is approaching, and she is more and more lucid, he can talk to her, and he’s like, “Why are you in the cemetery?” She’s like, “I’m lost. I don’t know where I am. Can you guide me out?”

[Thomas]
So is she…? I’m trying to figure out what it is exactly I’m trying to ask, basically, like, is she a sort of unknown zombie? People in the town don’t realize that she has gotten up out of the ground, and so no one has said, like, “Hey, watch out for her” or killed her or locked her up anywhere. They don’t realize that this threat exists, and of course, he doesn’t know or believe it.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Then that goes back to the crypt. How? Well, she was in the crypt, and so she has come out of whatever she was in in the crypt. And as the super flower blood moon gets closer, she gets stronger and smarter. She’s able to figure out how to get out of the crypt, but she’s still disoriented by all the flowers in the cemetery.

[Shep]
Does she know that she’s a zombie?

[Emily]
No, but she has weird cravings and instincts.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I think during the moon, they’re just more normal. Right? So eventually, once that event is over and we’re moving away from it, they’ll go back to wanting to eat brains or whatever our zombies do.

[Emily]
Is it some weird caveat to the curse that makes it all the more painful is that when this super flower blood moon comes, you can see your loved ones again as they once were? Because the original curse that people were still living there that were related to these people.

[Thomas]
Maybe that’s the origin of the curse. It was a spell gone wrong. Somebody wanted to see their dead relative again.

[Emily]
And then they turned into the zombie.

[Thomas]
Right. They accidentally sort of cursed the whole cemetery. And it worked like maybe they performed the rite under a super flower blood moon originally, and it worked, like, all the loved ones came back to life.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
And so the first year, it was like, “Oh, this is great,” until they all turned into zombies. And then people didn’t realize this ground is cursed. So they buried more people there.

[Emily]
Yeah. First incident, that was a fluke. That was madness set out by Satan.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
There’s got to be zombies, people that were killed in that zombie surge, that were then buried in that graveyard because they didn’t know not to at that time.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Definitely.

[Shep]
Does that matter at all? Does that come up at all? Or is that just, don’t worry about that.

[Thomas]
It might come up later. I think it’s a good thing to keep in our back pocket.

[Emily]
Good conversation to have between characters. Like our librarian character.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
She’s telling him a little bit of town history.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Because she’ll know all the history, because she’s read all the books, because she’s a super nerd that works in a library.

[Emily]
Yeah. In a tiny town with nothing to do.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And no one else her age.

[Thomas]
Are they having, like, a town meeting and Marian basically volunteers to deal with him? “Look, he’s basically my age. I know more about any of this than any of you anyway.”

[Shep]
No.

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
No. She doesn’t.

[Emily]
The town busybody does because the town busy body is like, “We need more babies in this town. These two are the same age. We’re going to hook them,” and everyone’s- And she’s like, “That’s not how it works. What if he’s gay?”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
“Just because we’re the same age doesn’t mean we’re going to get married and have babies.”

[Thomas]
I love the idea that Marian is like, “He could be gay,” and the old Karen who lives in the town is like, “What? No. What?”

[Emily]
“Nobody’s gay. That’s a myth.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“You could change him.”

[Emily]
“He just hasn’t met the right girl.”

[Thomas]
All right, we’ve got the kind of overall framework of our story, so what is the sort of timeline here?

[Shep]
Do we have the town meeting first or do we have him going into the town first?

[Thomas]
Do we ever meet the aunt, or is it just like he’s showing up in town?

[Shep]
Oh!

[Thomas]
The movie starts as the moving van is coming into town or his car is pulling up.

[Shep]
I can see that.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
With the credits where it’s him driving with the little car with all the stuff on the top strapped down.

[Thomas]
Yeah. He comes into town. He goes past the Welcome to WhateversVille sign and just as you get the directed by credit, he kind of rolls up and stops in front of the cemetery, which is this obscene field of flowers, and he’s just like, “Whoa.” And then drives on to the house.

[Shep]
Or does he not even notice it’s just flowers? He doesn’t know that it’s-

[Emily]
Well, because if it’s nighttime, he doesn’t really, yeah.

[Shep]
I think we need a precredit scene that’s the aunt who knows that she’s dying, like maybe leaving a note or trying to plan for the upcoming sequence of events since she’s not going to be around to take care of things.

[Thomas]
Does she try to leave him a note explaining anything? Does she even know that he’s going to be the one to come? Because she could have created her will a decade or 20 years ago and forgotten that’s who she left it to. She could die intestate. And then there’s some guy who figures out like, “Well, the next of kin is this dude,” so maybe she didn’t even plan on giving it to somebody.

[Shep]
I think that she did plan it and she did leave a note-

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
But then she died and zombified and destroyed the note, which could be a thing that the cops talk about. You see them at the scene or whatever and like, “Oh, burned note.” “What do you think it was? Anything important?” “Who knows?”

[Emily]
So we would see her zombify so the audience knows for sure this is real.

[Shep]
No, maybe we just see the cops clearing the scene after they’ve taken her down. I don’t know.

[Emily]
I think this is an important question. Do we want the audience to be with the main character and, like, skeptical, or do we want the audience to be like, “You’re fucking idiot, this is real. Believe them.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
No, we want them to be skeptical so that when we meet the woman in the graveyard, some of the people in the audience are like, “Is this a zombie?”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
“Because she seems like a normal person.”

[Emily]
All right.

[Shep]
And perhaps once they leave the graveyard together, they start chatting and maybe take a walking tour of the town because she’s trying to orient herself.

[Emily]
She’s trying to get home and she’s trying to remember her way home.

[Shep]
Right. None of this looks familiar. So there’s got to be some old, old buildings downtown that have always- a clock tower or whatever.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So what do they do on their exploration of downtown? That’s basically like a date.

[Thomas]
Well, so that kind of goes back to the question of how old is she? She’s got to be from the 1700s, right?

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
So everything’s going to be new to her. Is she going to speak in like an old timey accent?

[Emily]
No, this is Hollywood.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
Come on.

[Shep]
Well that’s what I’m asking because it would be inaccurate for her to speak in like a British accent.

[Emily]
I understand.

[Thomas]
Is it basically like hocus pocus where she’s kind of weird and she’s surprised by a lot of newer things, but she speaks normally enough, they’re able to communicate with each other.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
It’s a little strange, but he just thinks she’s a really quirky person.

[Emily]
Now you’ve kind of sold me on the whole, she speaks with a weird ancient American accent.

[Shep]
It’s still completely legible. I mean, it’s still understandable. Legible?

[Emily]
Yeah, it’s still English. It’s still modern English. Barely.

[Thomas]
We could establish earlier. Okay, so let’s say I’m a family in a car passing through town. What do the people think? Do they want me to just get the hell out? It’s this tiny New England town. Are they living off of tourism? So they have historical reenactors and so he thinks she’s just really into historical reenactment.

[Emily]
I could be sold on that.

[Shep]
That is just contrived enough to work.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And that would explain like certain things about the town. And maybe they’ve just told her that they could be completely lying about the history. “Oh, flowers were always grown here copiously. It’s been a big Dutch history in this area.”

[Emily]
“The first mayor’s wife loved flowers, and when she died of typhoid, he dedicated the town to her.”

[Shep]
So yeah, it’s a flower town. That’s their tourism selling point. And they have the reenactors.

[Emily]
Oh, and they’re growing it from, they haven’t, they’re heirloom seeds. So they’re heirloom flowers.

[Shep]
That’s why the town’s folk convincing him that he has to leave the flowers around his house because that’s just how it is in the town. That’s the town charter. You have a house there. You got to put flowers around it.

[Thomas]
Well, when that original mayor’s wife died, he wrote that into the town charter as like every home has to have a certain thing of flowers or something like that.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
That’s part of living here.

[Shep]
What’s the town in Washington that’s Bavarian themed?

[Emily]
Leavenworth.

[Shep]
Leavenworth. The whole town is themed that way.

[Thomas and Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
This is like that. This is that kind of town, but with flowers.

[Thomas]
So he thinks that this zombie is just one of the reenactors and, you know those SCA people they’re really dedicated to-

[Shep]
Right. She’s never going to break character.

[Thomas]
He’s like, “All right, whatever. It’s kind of quirky.”

[Shep]
Maybe he even thinks of ways like, “Oh, I bet you’ve never tried ice cream.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
To impress her. Yeah.

[Shep]
No. To try to get him to break character.

[Emily]
But it’s just impressing her. She’s like, “Oooh!”

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
All right. So what happens with her and with them? Obviously, they don’t end up together. Does he kill her? Is he the one who kills her? Or does Marian kill her?

[Emily]
Do we see her become-?

[Thomas]
She’s got to turn back. Right?

[Emily]
Do we see her turn back and try to attack a small child or Marian?

[Shep]
At what point in the movie are we? This has got to be towards the end because we’re at the-

[Emily]
Yeah, this is end of the second act-ish?

[Thomas]
When does the super flower blood moon happen? Is that the climax of the film?

[Shep]
No, the super flower blood moon ending is the climax of the film. Because that’s when the zombies turn back into zombies.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And that’s when either the main character or Marian kills the zombie lady. We have to know that she’s about to turn back. So at that point, because when we first meet her, we’re not sure. So we have to be able to cut away from this pair of people to what Marian is up to, and maybe the other town’s folk who are going around eliminating zombies that have popped up or whatever. We have to see zombies.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So we have to establish earlier that we can leave him and focus on other characters.

[Shep]
Right. Which is why I want to have the scene with the town meeting where they’re drawing straws or whatever to determine who’s going to deal with the new guy. Because it’s just a bad time for a new person. So it’s a big responsibility and nobody wants to do it. That’s why they’re getting Marian to do it. Like rigging the-

[Thomas]
Yeah. What is his goal?

[Shep]
At which point his goal in general is to settle down in this quirky town and write his horror novels.

[Emily]
So he’s Stephen King.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
He’s Stephen King.

[Thomas]
So he is Steve.

[Shep]
Oh, no.

[Emily]
So no.

[Shep]
Now we really can’t call him Steve because Stephen King it’s too on the nose. Dean. We’ll call him Dean something.

[Emily]
It can be Ephraim. It’s Ephraim because it’s bizarre enough, but it’s catching on in popularity again, and I like it.

[Shep]
If it’s catching on in popularity again now, then when is this movie set in the future? When he is old enough to-

[Emily]
No.

[Thomas]
In 2033, during the next super flower blood moon.

[Shep]
Oh, then it’s perfect. It’s perfect.

[Emily]
His name is Ephraim. Okay, we’re doing that.

[Thomas]
So if he’s trying to establish himself in the town, then he’s excited. He’s got two prospects. There’s Marian that maybe he goes out with her earlier and her whole thing is like, “I’m just trying to educate you, bro. Like I’m not interested.”

[Emily]
Yeah. She pretty much shoots him down, and he’s like, “Hey.” He tries to be slick, and she’s like, “No.”

[Shep]
She’s got an online boyfriend. He lives in Canada. You don’t know him.

[Thomas]
And then there’s this other woman, the zombie woman.

[Emily]
Who’s quirky and fun.

[Thomas]
Right. And she clearly works in the town’s primary industry.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
And they both seem to know a lot about the history of the town, which will be helpful for his writing. So either way.

[Shep]
Right. I think it would be funny. I know I said it as a joke, but if Marian did have an online boyfriend who shows up at the end.

[Emily]
That would be great.

[Shep]
He thinks that she’s just blowing him off and making up a thing.

[Thomas]
Is he Steve?

[Shep]
Yes!

[Thomas]
Did he used to live in the town? But he moved away, so he already knows what’s up.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, that’s really good. Yeah, he’s coming down for the flower blood moon.

[Thomas]
Right. Because he knows it’s all hands on deck.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
So why didn’t she move with him?

[Shep]
She’s got responsibilities.

[Emily]
They’re just doing this online long distance thing.

[Thomas]
Well, maybe the relationship is new.

[Emily]
Oh.

[Shep]
Oh, he moved away to go to college. He’s going to come back. This is a temporary thing.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
So he just comes back to help assist. Okay, that makes sense.

[Thomas]
Right. He’s off getting his masters in library science.

[Shep]
Right. They’re going to open a little library together. A boutique library.

[Emily]
That’s what I’m calling my office from now on. “Welcome to my boutique library.” I just got to get more books.

[Shep]
I like the Internet boyfriend thing more and more the more I think about it.

[Emily]
Yeah. I like them not ending up with each other and him having to kill the zombie.

[Shep]
So the zombie dies and the librarian is with someone else. He’s just all alone with zero prospects. There’s got to be a cougar or someone, an older lady. That, when the pickings are slim…

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Steve’s mom.

[Shep]
That’s really good. Especially if you don’t establish that it’s Steve’s mom.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
At the beginning, she’s just another lady at the town meetings.

[Emily]
She’s a little flirty with him.

[Shep]
She’s flirty with him and he sees her around. And then at the end when Steve shows up and she’s also there, she’s like, “Hey, sweetie.” And he’s like, “Hey, mom.”

[Emily]
I really like it.

[Shep]
Maybe Steve is the one that kills the zombie girl. Like our main character can’t bring himself to do it. For some reason Marian can’t do it. She’s occupied with something or whatever. And everyone’s yelling at him to kill the old timey zombie girl before she turns all the way. And he’s like, he can’t do it, he can’t do it. And then her head explodes and Steve comes in.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I like that in that it definitely feels like things Steve would do. Steve wouldn’t give a shit. He knows what’s up. And it feels real in that Ephraim would have a hard time doing that because he’s never done that before.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And it’s this person he started to get feelings for. The one thing I don’t like about it is that what does Ephraim do? He’s just this flat character who wanders around the whole movie.

[Shep]
That is a good point. Are we supposed to identify with this main character? I think that he shouldn’t kill the zombie, though, because it’s like killing a person, which is not a thing that he’s done.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
He’s new to this world, and this is his first rodeo.

[Thomas]
But does he end up leaving the town at the end? What he realizes is, “This isn’t for me. I can’t do this. Good luck to all of you. I’m out of here.”

[Shep]
I don’t know.

[Emily]
I want him to stay and then have it be like they’re going to train him. Like, “You’ll get used to it.”

[Shep]
Yeah, Steve could just be like, “Yeah, you get used to it.” Wiping all the gore off of Ephraim’s face. Also, this is all just rich fodder for writing his novels.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Okay. Is Steve actually her boyfriend or is it her brother? And she’s just been really cagey. “Oh, I love Steve.”

[Shep]
You really want to keep that open?

[Thomas]
Well, because then he has a much stronger reason to stay, and it’s a thing that, like, he can overcome. And it’s not like Steve has killed his two romantic prospects by showing up. I mean, Steve would be basically the antagonist for him at that point.

[Shep]
I like this as a twist, especially if it’s just Ephraim’s assumption that Steve is her boyfriend. Maybe like, on her computer background, it’s a photo of the two of them.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
“Who is that?” “Oh, that’s Steve.”

[Emily]
“That’s from our trip to the Grand Canyon.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. Yes.

[Emily]
Not knowing it was like a graduation trip.

[Thomas]
I think even she she even knows he’s like, “Oh, I guess you probably love him a lot, huh?” And she’s like, “Yes, I do.” And she totally knows that he thinks that it’s a boyfriend, and she knows, like, “I’m going to let him assume that.”

[Shep]
Right. Also, if they’re brother and sister, then Steve’s mom is also her mom. So all of those interactions that you see the two of them earlier get recontextualized.

[Thomas]
But then maybe he doesn’t need to kill in the movie.

[Shep]
Who, Ephraim or Steve?

[Thomas]
Ephraim,

[Shep]
Yeah, Ephraim doesn’t kill in the movie.

[Thomas]
He doesn’t need to because his change is just deciding to stay and accept this totally bonkers life?

[Shep]
Yeah, you see him at the end putting flowers on zombie girl’s crypt.

[Thomas]
Maybe earlier she asked him to clear away some flowers and he did. And so now at the end of the movie, he’s putting them back. He’s replanting what he previously messed up.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Do we have enough of a story?

[Shep]
I mean, we can always add more to this story.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I think we have the bones of it. We know how it begins and ends.

[Thomas]
The middle is definitely, I think, the weakest part. We don’t really know what the second act is. I mean, it feels like we’re skipping over a lot.

[Emily]
Isn’t the second act, like, learning about the town, watching the town do its weird town things and getting to know Marian and finding out that she has this possible boyfriend-

[Thomas]
Yeah. I guess just like, a lot of what we have feels like it would go pretty quickly. I don’t know how we could stretch it out without it being dull. And how much time does he spend with the zombie girl?

[Shep]
He spends the second half of the movie with the zombie girl. Like, it peaks at the flower of blood moon starting, and he goes on basically the date with the girl. And then you go back to Marian, who’s fighting zombies and it’s her responsibility to find the new guy and make sure that he’s okay during this event that he is not ready for.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So what’s the low point? Marian, in his mind is taken. I mean, I think that kind of goes back to like, what is his ultimate goal? Why does he think that living here is not going to work? If the change is he definitely decides. So he shows up, like, skeptical about the town?

[Shep]
No, I think he shows up enthused about the town, but maybe it’s too much. Maybe it’s too quirky. Like he wanted a quirky small town, but it’s like he wished on a monkey’s paw and it’s way too quirky. This is not usable. All of these characters are too weird.

[Thomas]
Right. No one would believe-

[Shep]
Right. It’s unbelievable.

[Thomas]
Truth is truly stranger than fiction in this case.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Plus he has to maintain all these damn flowers and he’s not a gardener. This isn’t what he wants.

[Shep]
Yeah, it’s the HOA president keeps showing up at his house every day and is like, “Okay, you really have to maintain your yard. It’s in the charter. You have to do it. It’s not a choice. If you want to live here, you have to do all this stuff.”

[Thomas]
And maybe the house is in, internally, is in a bit of disrepair too.

[Emily]
Well yeah. Because great aunt’s been spending her whole time in the yard. Plumbing isn’t working right.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
The paint’s peeling.

[Shep]
Smells like someone died.

[Emily]
There’s a family of raccoons living in the fireplace.

[Thomas]
Luckily they all have green thumbs.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Thomas]
They’re really good with the flowers.

[Emily]
They’re super good.

[Shep]
So yeah, maybe he originally shows up. He’s enthused about this new experience, this new town, but it’s so unlike where he lived. The town just shuts down at night. Like he wants to go out and do stuff and there’s nothing to do. Nothing is open.

[Emily]
Yeah. How is he supposed to meet other people?

[Thomas]
Well, if there are bars on the windows, that indicates that there is danger. Even though they’re vigilant, there is danger. When are zombies active? At night. So like, that’s why the town shuts down. It’s on purpose.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It might be a tourist trap, but there aren’t hotels. There’s no public house. You can’t stay there.

[Shep]
Right. You can come and visit.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
There is a day tour, but at 07:00 p.m., that bus is leaving.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So be on it.

[Emily]
I was thinking the way he could find out is that he doesn’t do what he’s supposed to do. He doesn’t care for one of the plots one night. Like, he skips it because it’s small and there’s enough. No one’s going to notice it’s in the middle.

[Thomas]
Instead of like placing flower, he’s just like tossing them around like “Ugh, fucking, whatever.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Like a newspaper boy.

[Thomas]
Yeah, but he misses one.

[Shep]
It’s close enough.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
And it’s in the middle of the cemetery. “No one’s going to notice that that gravestone is missing its flowers. I’m not going to go back and fix it.” And that can be, like, days before the peak time. And then he goes into the cemetery to do the flowers like he’s supposed to, and he sees her, and she’s not like the zombie he saw before. So he’s like, “You got to get out of here, man. You can’t just be wandering around here.”

[Shep]
If you know zombies exist and you meet someone in a cemetery, at least on some level, you should worry.

[Emily]
This is true.

[Shep]
Have they explained to him the significance of the super flower blood moon?

[Thomas]
Well, I was just going to ask, how much does he know at that point? Because if he knows that flowers are the zombies’ weakness and then he meets this woman in the cemetery who gosh, she sure doesn’t like flowers.

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s true.

[Thomas]
Like, how stupid is he?

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
But I think it would be helpful, I think it would be helpful for him to have met her and sort of judged her or something. He has in his head who and what she is before he finds out about all that stuff. So he doesn’t make that connection. It’s not in his mind. When that happens, she’s just like, “Oh, these flowers.” And he’s like, “Oh, I’ll move them out of the way for you.” And then later he finds out flowers are bad, but he doesn’t go back and rethink about the thing that’s already happened. He was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s whatever her name is. We’re friends.”

[Shep]
I think that he has to not maintain his yard. Like his flowers are dying or are dead. And this is what the HOA president keeps complaining to him about so that zombie girl can come back to his place.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
This is when, you know, like, the moon is going to set soon, so you know she’s going to turn. Now you have that clock that she is with him in his house where he can’t escape. There are bars on the windows.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Shep]
So he can’t know that zombies are real prior to this point.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
So I like him bringing her back to his place and her being okay with it because there aren’t flowers. But she is there long enough for her to turn. Like, he wakes up the next morning and she has turned and she’s trying to eat him? And he manages to get out of the house? And now there’s a zombie locked in his house?

[Shep]
No, no, no, no. They have to get there. They’re going there to rescue him because it’s Marian’s responsibility to take care of the new guy. So she has to know that the zombie is with him somehow.

[Thomas]
So does the zombie escape, though, to continue to be a threat so that Steve can kill her later?

[Shep]
No, I think Steve shows up and kills her in the house. This is, it’s a big house. So-

[Thomas]
So where in the movie is this?

[Shep]
This is towards the end. This is the climax of the movie.

[Thomas]
What is the mid second act turning point? What is the lowest low? What are these, like, major story beats? Because frankly, it sounds like he spends 20 minutes of the movie with her, tops. And we’ve got another 70 minutes to fill. Like we’ve got the first ten minutes and the last half hour. And it’s everything in between that that I don’t know what happens.

[Emily]
45 minutes movie. It’s all you need.

[Thomas]
And again, why at the point that he meets her, does he not recognize that she’s a zombie? I mean, it sounds like Marian hasn’t told him yet, but then that doesn’t feel like the end of the movie. That feels like early second act, which is why I like the idea of her escaping. And now there’s an added threat. And now “Oh, man. Fucking new guy. I swear to god, you let a zombie loose in the town, like, come on, man.” So it’s like they already kind of don’t love that he’s there because the timing really sucks. Oh, and he showed up, and the first thing he does is fuck it all up.

[Emily]
I actually like the idea of her escaping and, like, wreaking havoc so it’s less like you don’t feel as bad when she dies. Like, you’re a little less like-

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true.

[Shep]
I like the zombie escaping and adding- because that’s the midway where he realizes the zombies are real. And then you have the second half of the movie where they’re trying to track down this zombie that’s loose in the town.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
You have him and Marian adventuring together.

[Thomas]
So one more thought that I had had was when he clears the way for the zombie girl to leave the cemetery, does that mean he accidentally has created a path for other zombies?

[Emily]
Yes. 100%.

[Shep]
Oh, absolutely.

[Emily]
So the whole town-

[Shep]
That’s where all the other townspeople are.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That’s why no one else is helping them track down Zombie Girl.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Because everyone else is at the cemetery stemming the tide of zombies coming out. “Some fool cleared away the flowers at Alpha entrance.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
I think that we have the bones of it and we can add more stuff to it.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Emily]
Yeah. I think we have the good bones. I think that we like the story enough that we want to make it as perfect and fully fleshed as possible. But-

[Thomas]
Yes. But I think you’re right. I think we have pretty much overall what happens. There are definitely some other details that we would want to make sure we add. But Emily, I think you’re right. I think we’re spending a lot of time on it because we really like this story and we want it to be as good as we can.

[Emily]
Yeah, if we like this one enough, then we’re like we got to make it perfect.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Well, clearly we love it, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s show. Was it fresh as a daisy, or was it an oops-a-daisy? Let us know by leaving a comment on our website, reaching out on social media, or sending us an email. Links to all of those can be found at AlmostPlausible.com We’re hoping to make our second year bigger than our first, and we need your help to make that happen. The best way is to tell someone about the show. If you’re a fan of Almost Plausible, see if you can casually bring it up in every single conversation like I do. Emily, Shep, and I will return to tiptoe through the tulips on another episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]